They say: “a good craftsperson never blames their tools”. But attorneys are blaming legal AI technology vendors for hallucinations in their products.

That’s what the Technology Team of Project Counsel Media and Luminative Media is reporting in this article, where they reference my post from this morning (thanks team!) discussing that hallucinations are a by-product of how large language models (LLMs) work and are here to stay.

In the article, they report that lawyers are increasingly naming specific legal technology AI tools that they allege were involved in hallucination errors in court, pushing the legal tech industry into the spotlight.

Past instances of hallucinations with legal AI tools have typically involved drafting. Today, hallucinations are springing up in research tools that have legal citations. Many of these legal tech providers use case law to build their tools, and note that some attorneys might use multiple legal AI tools for matters and cherry-pick the vendors they cite when caught with a hallucination.

But, the authors report, lawyers blaming tools for hallucinations is now becoming more routine than exceptional.

They provide a handful of examples of legal AI tools where hallucinations have been reported, which you can check out in the article.

They also note that “Studies show that most attorneys are now using over 800 different legal AI tools”, which doesn’t surprise me; in fact, the latest GenAI Legal Tech Map from LegalTech Hub (from March) “features 1,014 GenAI product placements by 806 vendors across 19 different categories.” That’s more than double the size of their original map from February 2025 which had 400 GenAI product placements. Dang.

The authors in the Project Counsel Media quote attorney and data scientist Damien Charlotin (who maintains the AI hallucinations database of cases with filings containing AI hallucinations – for which I provide a weekly running count on Friday (another mention – thanks again!).

Charlotin told Law360 that roughly 10% of the entries on his hallucination database include the name of the tool used. ChatGPT is the most commonly used tool behind those hallucinations, which Charlotin suspects is driven by pro se litigants, because counsel might be less willing to cite specific legal tools.

Most major legal AI vendors are listed at least once on the hallucinations database. A few of them get upset over these mentions, Charlotin said: “I got emails low-key threatening me to remove the mentions. I doubt there would be any reputational impact, though, at least for the big ones”.

Threatening him to remove the mentions? That’s just silly.

Charlotin added that most major vendors no longer promise their tools will be free of hallucinations. Many have added new techniques that improve AI, such as retrieval-augmented generation, and legal citations, to lower hallucination rates, but still emphasize the importance of human controls. As they should.

Another notable quote in the article comes from Daniel W. Linna Jr., director of law and technology initiatives at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, who said this: “It does harm the reputation of AI providers when they are named in court orders, but savvy lawyers know that the errors say a lot more about the lawyer than the platform that they used”.

Couldn’t agree more. Like I said this morning, as long as LLMs primarily operate through probability-based prediction, the probability that hallucinations will go away is zero. This goes for legal AI tools as well.

Attorneys are blaming legal AI technology vendors for hallucinations in their products, but that’s just silly too. The blame falls on them – not the tools – for failing to adequately check the outputs from those products. A good craftsperson never blames their tools.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that attorneys are blaming legal AI technology vendors for hallucinations? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using DALL-E 3, using the term “robot lawyer wearing a suit raging at their workstation”.

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